Paying Attention
Learn how to retain more information during class so you don't have to slave away after school
Hello, and welcome back! It’s been a while since I’ve last written something since I’ve been caught up studying with various classes and other activities. To help you guys avoid that, today I’ll talk about how to best pay attention during class to reduce the amount of time you have to spend studying at home. Without further delay, let’s get started!
Before we dive into how to retain information from your classes, I want to go over why it’s good to pay attention during class. Even though I sound like a father, paying attention is essential for getting good grades while putting in minimal work. Unless your teacher is absolute garbage, you should always be actively engaging in class. Doing this allows your work at home to center around reinforcing information, rather than learning new information.
The first step is to not be distracted during class. Playing games can be fun, but a key part of retaining information is to actively participate to keep it inside your head. Make sure that you’re not on your phone, and catch yourself if you find yourself zoning out your teacher. When listening to a lecture, make sure to be doing something actively. It can be writing down notes in your notebook, or asking questions. If your teacher makes an effort to engage your classroom, make sure to respond. Not only will it make them like you more, but I’ll also help you correlate and relate information inside of your head.
The second step is to make sure that you get lots of sleep. I’ll create a whole different guide on this later, but the way sleep works is different for everybody. Some people I know seem to function purely on their determination to live and caffeine, while others can’t function without their precious eight hours. However, it’s been shown that sleep improves your ability to retain information that you learn, so you should try to get as much of it as possible.
An idea I’ve been fascinated with recently is the forgetting curve. The forgetting curve kind of looks like an exponential decay function, and it’s a theory that hypothesizes that you forget the most amount of information immediately after you learn it. To combat this, you want to constantly refresh the information that you learn. Do this by studying in chunks and studying consistently instead of cramming the night before. You can also stop the forgetting of information by using different teaching methods so that no learning method repeats too much.
Paying attention in class is a skill that goes beyond academic success; it is a life skill that cultivates focus and discipline for all of your future goals. We should all challenge ourselves to be more present inside the classroom and retain more information so that we can spend less effort on studying and more on our hobbies and things that we love doing. That’s it for today, and see you next time!